Make Wealth Historyhttp://makewealthhistory.org
Because the earth can't afford our lifestyleTue, 31 Mar 2015 12:52:12 +0000enhourly1http://wordpress.com/http://0.gravatar.com/blavatar/4f8239d100eaeed2df5ad894aa9aca9a?s=96&d=http%3A%2F%2Fs2.wp.com%2Fi%2Fbuttonw-com.pngMake Wealth Historyhttp://makewealthhistory.org
Giving it all awayhttp://makewealthhistory.org/2015/03/30/giving-it-all-away/
http://makewealthhistory.org/2015/03/30/giving-it-all-away/#commentsMon, 30 Mar 2015 19:23:48 +0000http://makewealthhistory.org/?p=13811]]>This weekend Tim Cook announced that he would be giving away his fortune. As the head of Apple, that’s a lot to give away, but he’s not the first extremely wealthy individual to make that choice. A few years ago Warren Buffett declared that he planned to give away 99% of his wealth, and he invited others in his position to do likewise on a website called The Giving Pledge.

I wrote about The Giving Pledge when it launched, with Buffett’s letter the only entry at the time. There are now over 100, including some well known names – Ted Turner, George Lucas, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg.

I often hear cynical comments about this. “They can afford to do it” is one, or suggestions that if they’re really so generous they wouldn’t have amassed so much in the first place. Or perhaps it’s the declaring it that people object to – although the reason for doing so, as Buffett said, is to encourage philanthropy and the list of signatories reflects that.

I think rich people giving their fortunes away is to be celebrated. There’s nothing wrong with wealth, if it is honestly gained and used well. It’s wealth at the expense of others and wealth hoarded that’s the problem. If you consider your wealth to be a resource at the disposal of others, you can do an immense amount of good in the world.

There’s another reason why we should encourage philanthropy – if we believe in a more equal world, giving is just about the only form of global redistribution open to us. Projects like Oxfam’s ‘Even it Up‘ campaign do a fine job of highlighting inequality, but solutions tend to cluster around holding back executive pay or closing tax loopholes, and that doesn’t get us very far when it comes to billionaires. Tax is only raised at the national level, and besides the pittance that goes out in foreign aid, it is also spent nationally. Even if billionaires paid a higher level of tax and didn’t wriggle out of it, it wouldn’t magically reach the poorest in the world. The tax from America’s 422 billionaires is spent in America, and the tax from Pakistan’s 1 billionaire is presumably spent in Pakistan.

It is highly unlikely that we are going to devise an international wealth tax, despite the occasional call for it. It seems decades away to me. That means we don’t have any formal mechanism for redistributing wealth from rich individuals, unless it is voluntary. Since a goodly number of people do want to give their money away, shouldn’t we talk more about philanthropy?

It’s not a perfect mechanism, of course. As the development world has discovered with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, major philanthropists can wield an unhealthy amount of power. There’s the risk that the agenda gets rewritten around the particular interests of big donors, rather than the evidence base. As we saw with the Gates’ ‘reinvent the toilet’ competition, or One Laptop Per Child, the Silicon Valley philanthropists are drawn to technological solutions. Sometimes targets are too narrow, aimed too exclusively on a specific and glamorous goal. For example, there has been a rush of money towards finding a cure for Ebola, and not enough spent on supporting medical services in the Ebola areas, or investing in long-term health provision for poor communities. Everyone wants to say they funded the miracle cure, rather than paying the wages of nurses. Then there’s the risk of dependency, or the danger that by championing philanthropy, we ignore the injustices of a system that makes the rich richer far faster than the poor get less poor.

These are all legitimate concerns, but sound to me like an argument for intelligent and accountable philanthropy, rather than scepticism. After all, what else do we suggest the Gates, Mr Buffett or Tim Cook do with it all?

]]>http://makewealthhistory.org/2015/03/29/what-we-learned-this-week-212/feed/0learned-this-weeksupajemThe elephant gardeners of the African foresthttp://makewealthhistory.org/2015/03/26/the-elephant-gardeners-of-the-african-forest/
http://makewealthhistory.org/2015/03/26/the-elephant-gardeners-of-the-african-forest/#commentsThu, 26 Mar 2015 20:23:29 +0000http://makewealthhistory.org/?p=13806]]>Yesterday I wrote about the volunteer gardeners of Elephant and Castle, but that reminds me of something tangential but interesting. In some places, Elephants are known as the ‘gardeners of the forest’.

Until recently, most of us believed there were two kinds of elephants – African ones and Asia ones. Then in 2010 a study showed that Africa actually has two kinds and they are genetically different enough to be considered separate species – the African bush elephant that we know, and the African forest elephant, that is more reclusive and less familiar.

The forest elephant lives in the Congo. It has rounder ears, yellower tusks and it is smaller than its savannah dwelling cousin. They are known as gardeners because they eat plants and fruit, and spread the seeds through their dung. They often carry seeds a long way, breaking them down in their gut and increasing the likelihood of germination, depositing them helpfully in a pile of manure and fulfilling a vital role in sustaining the forest. They have been doing this for so long that some plants are dependent on their elephant caretakers, so specifically adapted that they have no other means of reproducing.

It’s a beautiful relationship, when you think about it. The trees offer their seeds to the elephants in the form of tasty fruits. The elephants eat them and return the favour by depositing the seeds, pre-fertilised, elsewhere in the forest.

As well as dispersing seeds, elephants create paths and clearing through the forest, trampling down undergrowth and letting in the light. This makes space for new saplings to break through and creates habitats for other creatures.

The positive effects of all this echo far beyond plant diversity in the Congo basin. The cooling effect and evaporation from forests plays a role in weather patterns, and they are vital carbon sinks. The good work of the elephants matters to Africa’s rain, and ultimately to global climate change.

That’s why it matters that Africa’s elephants are in decline. As ZSL’s magazine puts it, “every year, enough new elephants are born to boost the population in Africa by 5%. But every year, 7% of the population is destroyed by poachers.” If that decline isn’t reversed, then elephants could be extinct in the wild by 2034.

Conservation is often portrayed as ‘saving’ a species. But in our inter-connected world, it’s often much bigger than that.

]]>http://makewealthhistory.org/2015/03/26/the-elephant-gardeners-of-the-african-forest/feed/0Forest elephant congosupajemForest elephant congoThe gardeners of Elephant and Castlehttp://makewealthhistory.org/2015/03/25/the-gardeners-of-elephant-and-castle/
http://makewealthhistory.org/2015/03/25/the-gardeners-of-elephant-and-castle/#commentsWed, 25 Mar 2015 13:00:11 +0000http://makewealthhistory.org/?p=13800]]>On my way to my London office, which I frequent a couple of times a week, I get off the train and walk through Elephant and Castle. It’s a distinctive and slightly odd part of the city, dominated by a down-at-heel shopping centre and an enormous roundabout.

I actually quite like the shopping centre, which is big and blue and was sold for £80 million a couple of years ago. It has the same smell and vibe as the Sarit Center in Nairobi in the late 90s. That is wonderful to me but, perhaps understandably, not to the local authorities. Its multicultural food and homewares stores are to be swept away and replaced with luxury flats and a Sainsbury’s.

Outside the mall is the roundabout. It has three lanes of traffic all around it and large billboards. There are tiled underpasses for pedestrians, and I got lost in them several times when we first moved the office here. In the middle of the roundabout is a large steel box, the Faraday Monument, built in the 1960s as a memorial to the electricity pioneer. It’s got to be one of London’s least noticed monuments, because it looks – and indeed is – an electrical substation. This makes more sense when you learn that the architect wanted it built in glass, so that we could all see the workings. That would be a much better tribute to Faraday.

The glory of Elephant and Castle, and the streets around it, is its plantings. There are beds of shrubs and flowers on the roundabout, bulbs and herbs around the base of trees, and explosions of sunflowers and lavender in the summer. Heathers and rosemary tumble down around the spiky cordylines on the traffic islands, and the corner by the office even has raspberries.

This is not the work of the council, generally speaking. It’s all planted and tended by volunteers and local residents, coordinated through the GuerrillaGardening.org website. Next to the roundabout is Perronet House, home to Richard Reynolds, who runs the site and has become the go-to spokesman for guerrilla gardening around the country. (I reviewed his book here.)

The volunteers are not just concerned with guerrilla garderning either. They take care of the parks and run ‘mobile’ gardens and wildflower meadows on un-used land – all planted on crates and in tubs so they can be relocated. They clean the tiles and repaint the underpass, and campaign to improve the area, encourage biodiversity and build community. This campaigning has been particularly necessary recently, as major works are planned in Elephant and Castle, including road widening that will take over many of the community plantings. Some are gone already. As the area is redeveloped, the local community has fought to protect mature trees and green spaces, and ensure that pedestrians and cyclists are given due consideration.

I mention all of this because this week I walked past the beds around Perronet House, next to the bus stop, and saw this little sign. I thought I’d write about it, as an opportunity to say congratulations on ten years of good work, and thank you for the difference you make to the area. The Elephant and Castle gardeners are a beautiful example of what happens when public spaces are valued and local people are prepared to invest some time in what’s theirs. Everybody benefits, even those just passing through on the way to the office.

You can keep up with developments on Facebook, and to hear Richard Reynolds talk about the area in his own words, here’s a TEDx talk about it:

]]>http://makewealthhistory.org/2015/03/25/the-gardeners-of-elephant-and-castle/feed/2IMG_20150325_085104supajemcornerIMG_20150325_085104Cryptocurrencies for goodhttp://makewealthhistory.org/2015/03/24/cryptocurrencies-for-good/
http://makewealthhistory.org/2015/03/24/cryptocurrencies-for-good/#commentsTue, 24 Mar 2015 13:00:04 +0000http://makewealthhistory.org/?p=13796]]>Since the release of BitCoin a few years ago, there has been an explosion of interest in alternative online currencies. A host of cryptocurrencies has followed, with dedicated exchanges, forums, apps, and even ATMs. For those that don’t move in that world, it’s been hard to keep up. I admit I don’t know my DogeCoin from my DarkCoin, and I’m yet to be convinced that I should.

The reason there are so many variations is that creating and managing a currency has been dramatically democratized. It’s not exactly easy, and most people that try it are going to fail to find a user base, but it’s a world away from the enormous machinery of traditional money – banks, printing presses, and maybe even vaults full of gold.

All currency serves somebody, and since people can now set up their own central banks with a rack of computers, you can make niche currencies to serve specific constituencies. Some people have used this power to make untraceable money for illegal trading, or joke currencies for tipping online content creators. And some have used it to try and make good things happen in the world.

Permacredits is one such project. It’s been created to encourage permaculture, as a mechanism of exchange for the movement and a way to reward those who support it. To get Permacredits, you donate to the Permacredits Foundation, who use your donation to fund permaculture-based businesses. When those businesses turn a profit and pay back into the foundation, your credits go up in value. In theory, it’s a currency based directly on the hard work of permaculturalists, rather than speculation or the abstract computer ‘mining’ of Bitcoin.

Essentially, you use dollars to support permaculture farms and businesses, a way of ‘paying it forward’. The Permacredits you get in return can then be spent with those businesses, or converted into other cryptocurrencies on an open market.

Founder Xavier Hawk is overreaching spectacularly when he claims that “Permacredits is a vehicle to transform the world”, but it is an interesting idea. Like any alternative currency, it will either sink or swim, depending on how many people find it useful. What makes it worth highlighting is not just the environmental goals behind it, but the desire to use cryptocurrencies to effect change in the real world.

Permacredits is not alone in that. SolarCoin is another, designed to serve and encourage renewable energy. Producers of solar energy are paid one SolarCoin for every megawatt hour produced on a certified meter. Clean Water Coin aims to encourage water projects by channeling a tiny percentage of every transaction to water charities. HullCoin is the first online currency to be launched by a local authority, aimed at tackling poverty.

It’s impossible to say whether or not any of these will succeed. A Wikipedia count in January this year found over 740 different online currencies, and the failure rate is pretty high. We’re also a long way from the mainstream. Visit the SolarCoin website today and you’ll see the message “SolarCoin executed a planned hard fork at block 310,000. All users should update to the new wallets v1.5 immediately” – perfectly encapsulating the reasons why I cannot be bothered with these currencies myself. Not yet.

The reason I keep an eye on developments in cryptocurrencies is that it is exciting to see what Bitcoin has made possible. An ecosystem of currencies is already out there, and a whole new opportunity has opened up to create targeted money for social and environmental good.

]]>http://makewealthhistory.org/2015/03/24/cryptocurrencies-for-good/feed/0permacreditssupajempermacreditsWhatever happened to wave power?http://makewealthhistory.org/2015/03/23/whatever-happened-to-wave-power/
http://makewealthhistory.org/2015/03/23/whatever-happened-to-wave-power/#commentsMon, 23 Mar 2015 13:00:13 +0000http://makewealthhistory.org/?p=13791]]>Things are moving fast in the world of renewable energy, with wind and solar power continuing to make big advances. But amidst all the good news, there’s one technology that’s missing in action: wave power.

Ocean waves should be a huge power resource. The incoming wave power along Britain’s Atlantic coast has been estimated at 40kw per metre of coastline. It’s impossible to capture it all of course, but I thought we’d have a handful of local power plants up and running by now. I remember seeing the footage of the Pelamis ‘sea snake’ being tested in Scotland. Whatever happened to that?

Not much, as it happens. After 15 years of research, Pelamis went into administration last year. That’s a shame, since they were the first to generate power from the waves at scale, and they won’t ever see the rewards for that. The investors won’t get their millions back, but hopefully their research won’t go to waste.

The fundamental challenge with wave power is pretty simple, as Chris Goodall explains: “The forces are so enormous that energy collection structures have to be implausibly strong and heavy and construction costs are therefore excessive.” It’s easy enough to make something that can generate electricity from gentle swells, but everything has to be engineered to handle the worst possible weather. At the Orkney testing site, that could mean conditions like those in December last year – 144 mph winds and 12 metre wave heights. You’re going to need a lot of heavy steel, which unfortunately doesn’t take kindly to saltwater.

Is wave power a lost cause then? Well, the sea snakes may have washed up, but there are several other operators testing prototypes in Scotland, and there are other clusters of companies running trials in Australia and Oregon. A company called Aquamarine just announced some very positive results for their Oyster 800 device, but they did halve their workforce last year.

So far, the most reliable thing to come out of the Orkney testing site is photo opportunities for Alex Salmond. The real proof of wave power’s potential has to be the arrival of larger companies and commercial wave farms. On that front, the news is equally mixed.

One piece of good news is that last month the world’s first grid-connected wave farm was switched on in Australia. Developed by Carnegie Wave Power, its answer to the engineering challenge is to operate underwater rather than on the surface. Buoys tethered to the sea floor capture the swell, and pump seawater to a hydroelectric station on the shore. It will provide electricity and desalinated fresh water to Australia’s largest naval base.

On the other hand, Lockheed Martin announced ‘the world’s largest wave energy project’ last year, also in Australia, only to quietly shelve it a couple of months later.

In short, the wave power industry hasn’t cracked it yet. It’s an emerging technology. Pessimists will say it hasn’t come anywhere in ten years. Optimists might echo Edison, who joked that he discovered 10,000 things that didn’t work before delivering a workable light bulb, and argue that it is on the cusp of commercial viability.

Navigating between those extremes, Dave Levitan points out a parallel with wind power. Thirty years ago the industry hadn’t settled on an optimal turbine design, and prototyping was still going on. Wave power is in a similar position, and we may yet see a breakthrough. Since wind power and solar have got the march on it however, it is likely to remain a marginal technology, one for island states and coastal communities.

]]>http://makewealthhistory.org/2015/03/23/whatever-happened-to-wave-power/feed/9wave power cetosupajemPelamiswave power cetoBuilding of the week: WWF’s Living Planet Centrehttp://makewealthhistory.org/2015/03/20/building-of-the-week-wwfs-living-planet-centre/
http://makewealthhistory.org/2015/03/20/building-of-the-week-wwfs-living-planet-centre/#commentsFri, 20 Mar 2015 13:00:49 +0000http://makewealthhistory.org/?p=13785]]>If you’re an environmental charity and you’re commissioning a new office, you’re going to want to live up to your own standards and deliver a low-impact, highly efficient building. That’s the challenge WWF faced with their new offices in Woking, which incorporates a wide range of sustainable construction technologies.

To reduce the use of steel and concrete, which are CO2 intensive materials, they chose a wood beam roof. It is topped with solar panels and four wind cowls – large vents that naturally draw warm air out of the building and cool it in the summer. Automated solar shades also keep the building cool by helping to reduce solar gain.

In winter, the building relies on its ground source heat pumps. 20 boreholes, each 100m deep, take advantage of constant underground temperatures to provide renewable heat.

Rainwater is collected and used for flushing toilets and watering plants. Greywater is also reused from staff showers and wash basins. Rainwater also feeds a wetlands area next to the building, created to encourage biodiversity.

The attention to detail continues inside, with FSC certified furniture, and lights that automatically switch off when people leave a room. The carpets are 100% recycled.

Unusually, the whole building is elevated and built on top of a council car park. The car park had to be retained and is still in use, an intelligent land use idea that others might want to learn from. WWF staff are encouraged not to drive mind you. The site was chosen for its proximity to the station, and generous bike storage space is laid on.

WWF’s Living Planet Centre is open to the public should you wish to go and see for yourself.

]]>http://makewealthhistory.org/2015/03/20/building-of-the-week-wwfs-living-planet-centre/feed/0WWF-1supajemWWF-4WWF-1The best and worst of charity adshttp://makewealthhistory.org/2015/03/19/the-best-and-worst-of-charity-ads/
http://makewealthhistory.org/2015/03/19/the-best-and-worst-of-charity-ads/#commentsThu, 19 Mar 2015 15:15:17 +0000http://makewealthhistory.org/?p=13783]]>A couple of years ago I wrote about the Rusty Radiator awards, which name and shame the most exploitative, cliched charity ads – and honour those doing something different, respectful and inspiring. Out of curiosity, I looked them up again to check out this years winners and losers.

I won’t give the oxygen of publicity to the bad ones, but you can see for yourself on the website. The winner of the Golden Radiator was Save the Children, for their unorthodox fundraising video for Syria. “Any advocacy ad that can put you in the middle of the situation instead of casting people and situations you’d never imagine is a good one” says the jury. “You feel for the little girl as if she was someone you knew next door or your children went to school with. It emphasises the universality of suffering and empathy, and breaks racial stereotypes about who suffers.”

The other winners were a Norwegian charity which took a similar approach to Syria, and a short Oxfam film about growing rice in Liberia. You can watch them here.

]]>http://makewealthhistory.org/2015/03/19/the-best-and-worst-of-charity-ads/feed/0rusty-radiatorsupajemWhy cheap oil is as problematic as expensive oilhttp://makewealthhistory.org/2015/03/18/why-cheap-oil-is-as-problematic-as-expensive-oil/
http://makewealthhistory.org/2015/03/18/why-cheap-oil-is-as-problematic-as-expensive-oil/#commentsWed, 18 Mar 2015 13:00:41 +0000http://makewealthhistory.org/?p=13776]]>The oil price continues to bump along – today it’s at $42 a barrel, as low as it has been since the financial crisis. For some commentators, this is a good thing, a boost to a flagging global economy. But cheap oil is a problem too, something Samuel Alexander explores in his Simplicity Institute paper The Paradox of Oil.

For starters, some people are going to lose a lot of money. The lower the oil price falls, the larger the slice of global oil production that becomes uneconomic. Alternative fuels such as the Canadian tar sands, or some US shale, need a high oil price to break even. Bankruptcy and falling production will follow if prices stay down long enough.

Building on that, cheap oil scares off investors hoping for the high returns that expensive oil brings. When prices fall, so does the return on investment from oil production. Oil companies pull the plug or postpone medium to long term production plans. The problem with this is that it leaves a shortfall in the future. A couple of years down the line, when that oil is needed to keep up with demand, it won’t be there. If it’s a big shortfall, that could mean a price spike, with the potential knock-on effects of recession and rising food prices.

As well as the break-even for oil companies, there’s a ‘fiscal break-even’ to consider too. Governments of oil-producing countries plan around a certain tax take, based on profits made from selling their fossil fuel resources. With falling prices comes falling revenue to the treasury, meaning financial crisis for countries like Russia, Iran or Venezuela. Half of Russia’s budget is from oil and gas, so a halving of the oil price means serious debt or painful austerity.

Those aspects have been discussed and are fairly well known. The environmental aspects of cheap oil aren’t quite so visible, Alexander argues. Renewable energy is falling in price all the time, improving its competitiveness against fossil fuels. However, cheap oil delays the moment of parity when renewable energy is as cheap, or cheaper than fossil fuels. By making renewable energy less competitive, cheap oil deters investors and delays the transition to clean energy.

In a striking comparison, Alexander likens our oil dependency to a heroin addiction. When heroin is expensive, addicts cut back on other things to pay for it, even things essential to life. When it’s cheap, they consume more and make it ever harder to give it up. “Oil acts as industrial civilization’s own form of heroin,” he says, “and whether it is cheap or expensive, addicts today are in as much trouble as ever.”

]]>http://makewealthhistory.org/2015/03/18/why-cheap-oil-is-as-problematic-as-expensive-oil/feed/10oilsupajemKeep it in the groundhttp://makewealthhistory.org/2015/03/17/keep-it-in-the-ground/
http://makewealthhistory.org/2015/03/17/keep-it-in-the-ground/#commentsTue, 17 Mar 2015 13:00:19 +0000http://makewealthhistory.org/?p=13774]]>Earlier this year the Guardian announced that it was going to be putting climate change ‘front and center‘ in its news coverage. Editor Alan Rusbridger explained that the media, his own paper included, has struggled to do justice to climate change. “We prefer to deal with what has happened, not what lies ahead” he wrote. “We favour what is exceptional and in full view over what is ordinary and hidden.”

I can understand Rusbridger’s frustration. As this week’s column inches about Jeremy Clarkson attest, what matters and what constitutes news don’t necessarily overlap.

As a slow motion, long term problem, climate change doesn’t make headlines, despite being one of the most serious issues journalists will cover in their careers. So the paper has been trying to remedy that problem, for its own readers at least, and taken on a much more campaigning edge in its coverage this spring.

Yesterday, that led to the launch of an actual campaign, Keep It In the Ground. It highlights the fact that we know how much carbon we can burn to stay within two degrees of warming – the ‘carbon budget’. The carbon content of known fossil fuel reserves is five times bigger than this carbon budget. If we exploit all known reserves, we will fundamentally change the atmosphere, to the point that it may prove incompatible with the civilization we have created for ourselves. To avoid that, we have to leave coal and oil reserves in the ground.

The Guardian has thrown its weight behind the divestment movement, started by Bill McKibben and 350.org. This week they are gathering names for a petition to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Wellcome Trust, urging them to divest. You can sign it here.